all we know is distance
by Satellites on Parade
Summary: Lance gestures vaguely with both hands. "What do you miss most about Earth?" Five conversations.


Cross-posting from AO3. A belated birthday gift for my friend, Meg (strikinglight), whose Keith/Lance fic "with quiet words I'll lead you in," available on AO3, is outstanding, and destroyed me completely, and inspired probably 97% of this.

* * *

 **I.**

"Keith! Oh, for the love of quiznak, are you even _listening_?!"

So, over the years, Keith has gotten pretty good over the years at concealing visible reactions to just about anything. Call it a defense mechanism; call it simple pragmatism—it's given him the upper hand in a wide array of situations, not the least of which is staring vacantly at the wall when he's probably supposed to be paying attention to something else.

In spite of all that, when Lance's sharp voice penetrates the veil of self-reflection (or, well, the veil of thinking-about-how-best-to-use-his-bayard-in-combat), it's all he can do not to jump out of his armor.

Thankfully, his external response is much more subdued—some rapid blinking, a slight tensing of the shoulders. He turns his head to find Lance frowning dubiously at him, helmet braced at his right hip by a slanting arm.

They're in the castle's equivalent of a locker room, changing out of their paladin armor after a routine patrol beat of the surrounding planets. There aren't very many of them where they are now—Keith had passed by two rust-orange dwarf planets and a paltry asteroid belt in the three vargas since Allura had deployed them—so it had not made for an especially thrilling evening even with Lance chattering away on his communication screen.

The room is dim, a product of Pidge's experiments with making the ship's systems emulate the cycle of daylight back home, but the neon turquoise glow of the castle's veining ambient lights illuminates the planes of Lance's narrow face, its uncanny hue matched only by the luminescence of his suit in the darkness.

"What?" Keith asks after a thick pause, and then shakes his head. "Oh. No."

Lance leans forward with dramatically raised eyebrows as though waiting on the edge of his seat for something he is doomed never to receive. Keith gets that face a lot from Lance.

"That's it?" Lance exclaims, flinging his other lanky arm out incredulously. "Not even an apology? Did a yupper teach you those manners, or what?"

(Keith very nearly has to physically fight back the knee-jerk urge to reply, "Yup.")

"Sorry," he says a little curtly. "You were saying?"

Lance throws his head back and lets out a sigh so loud it could jostle the ceiling. "Oh, whatever. If it's not worth paying attention to, I _get it_ ; I _understand_. You've got bigger fish to fry. Bigger thinks to think. It's _cool_."

Keith feels like he should maybe say something about the overwrought and wounded tone Lance is placing on the emphasized words, but what comes out in lieu of that is a flat, "'Thinks.'"

Lance pulls a particularly sour face. "Oh, you know what, shut up."

So Keith does. It's no skin off _his_ nose. He resumes the process of changing out of his armor, opening the door of his designated sort-of-locker so that it blocks Lance from view and setting his helmet on the top shelf. It isn't until he's pulling his jeans on that he hears Lance start moving around beside him.

Lance's silence is so aggressively transparent that Keith knows it's meant to needle him into breaking it, so he holds out for as long as he can, because if he has nothing left, at least he will always have his pride. But when Lance slams his own sort-of-locker shut pointedly and lets out a very obvious sigh before turning on his heel toward the exit, he can manufacture patience no longer.

"Oh, _fine_ , _what_?" he snaps, whirling around to scowl at the back of Lance's head. (His hair is still flattened in a particularly stupid-looking way from the helmet.) "I'm _sorry_ I wasn't hanging on your every _word_ , Lance; I'm listening now. What did you want to say?"

Lance shrugs, affecting an unconcern so artificial that it just annoys Keith further. "Well, if you don't _care_ —"

"I care so much it _hurts_ ," Keith hisses through clenched teeth.

He expects Lance to continue with the charade, making some smug remark about how truly flattering it is that Keith is so very invested in his opinions, but that does not happen. Instead, he watches as Lance's shoulders slacken, and listens as Lance exhales so softly that it's almost imperceptible. He still hasn't turned around to face Keith, but after a moment, he inclines his head just slightly, so that Keith can glimpse the tip of his nose, the edge of his line of eyelashes.

"It's kinda stupid, actually," he says, and Keith is so thoroughly baffled by his behavior now that he nearly starts gawking at him.

"No takebacks now, Lance," he groans. "Just say it, will you? I'm tired."

Lance lets out a small laugh through his nose, nothing like his usual braying noises, and lifts a hand to scratch sheepishly at the nape of his neck.

"I was just gonna ask," he mutters at last, sounding almost embarrassed. "What do you miss most?"

Keith lets that sink into the air for a second, as though its meaning will become clearer the longer it's there.

"What do I—?" He shakes his head. "I'm sorry; I don't—"

"About Earth, dingus," Lance cuts him off with an exasperated sigh. He gestures vaguely with both hands. "What do you miss most about Earth?"

Keith briefly remembers, then, how Lance's face had begun to pinch at the party only a few weeks (what are those called in Altean, again?) prior, when he had started to tell them about Varadero Beach, when speaking the name aloud had brought a rush of something impossibly sad to his typically energetic eyes. Keith had thought nothing of it, at the time—not like it had been the first thing on his mind after Sendak nearly killed them—and had, in truth, almost entirely forgotten about it, but now, hearing that same wistful tone in Lance's voice, the memory comes back to him, and clutches at something deep inside him, just as it inexplicably had back then.

He opens his mouth to offer some elusive, offhanded response—not like he has the heart to tell Lance that there's nothing for him to miss, and he is definitely not in the mood to start searching himself for homesickness when it's the thing that the Garrison always told its cadets to lose with all haste if they knew what was good for them—but stops himself when he remembers something else: Lance's hand in his, Lance's sleeping face inside the cryo-pod, and the sharp clarity in Lance's eyes in the instant after he had fired at Sendak, and saved Pidge, and maybe saved them all.

He inhales.

"I miss…" He searches himself as best he can for something honest, something that is his, because anything else feels suddenly insulting. "I miss stars."

At that, Lance turns fully around until he and Keith are facing each other, perhaps ten steps apart. His thin eyebrows are arched with surprise.

"Stars?" he repeats. The incredulity in his voice makes Keith's ears start to heat up. "What do you mean, ' _stars_?' Has it perhaps escaped your notice that we're, like—in outer space?"

"No, I mean—" Keith says sharply, then huffs, closing his eyes. "I mean... constellations. Ones I actually knew. Orion, the Pleiades; you know. That kind of stuff."

Lance blinks. "The who-now?"

"The—" Keith's brow furrows. "Dude, basic astronomy was part of general ed at the Garrison; do you seriously not remember? Didn't we have to study that for the exam?"

"I heard you didn't have to take the written exam," Lance says very suddenly, and the strangely vulnerable expression he'd had only a moment ago has vanished before Keith can commit it to memory, replaced by one of something like resentment.

He isn't wrong—Keith's unprecedented performance on the practical exam and his glowing letter of recommendation from the legendary Takashi Shirogane had been enough to get the written exam and essay waived—but...

"How do you know that?" he asks, wide-eyed. " _Why_ do you know that?"

"Oh, so it's true, huh?" Lance barks, almost loudly and theatrically enough to distract Keith from the newfound, inexplicable flush on his cheeks. "Mr. Ace Pilot? Mr. I'm-Too-Cool-To-Read?"

"I—I _read_ ," Keith retorts. "Also, wait. Hang on. Isn't this _not_ what we were talking about? When did this become about _me_?"

"Isn't it always about you?" Lance snaps, and Keith confesses himself now to be fully and totally lost. "You think you're so much better than me just cuz you got admitted on flight skills and you know some—some whatchama—Pliés? Whatever!"

" _What_ ," Keith half-shouts, throwing his arms in the air, "are you even _talking about_?!"

He and Lance stare each other down for a moment or two, wearing what are no doubt twin frustrated scowls, albeit for entirely different reasons, before Lance narrows his eyes and turns swiftly away, folding his arms petulantly at his chest.

"Oh, forget it!" he scoffs, striding toward the hallway that leads back to the sleeping quarters. More quietly, with a tone Keith can't identify, he grumbles, "Just forget it."

Keith stands in the center of the now-empty room, mouth agape, long after Lance has stormed out of sight. He wastes maybe a good minute trying to figure out what the hell just happened, but a solution does not come to him despite his efforts.

He doesn't dwell on it. Lance is Lance; he always pulls this kind of crap, for reasons Keith feels no closer to understanding even after the near-two months they've known each other. Maybe a day will come in the future when one of their conversations does not end with Lance blurting out something completely unrelated as though it's a knife Keith is twisting into his gut, but that day still seems a long way off.

When he passes Lance's cabin, he can see a strip of light seeping out into the hall from under the door, just as he has every night since Sendak had come, and he lets his eyes linger on it and lets himself halt in front of it, feeling weary and conflicted, for only a tick.

(For just longer than a second.)

* * *

 **II.**

Lance looks Keith decisively in the eye one day and announces, as though explaining an unshakeable scientific fact, "I'm going to beat you."

It's been about fifteen minutes since they'd all finished the training regimen Coran had concocted for them, which had involved trust falls and sit-ups and about ten rounds with the castle's strongest drone, and Keith is out of breath and annoyed. He lowers the towel he'd been using to dry his sweat-covered face to fix Lance with his most disgruntled possible stare.

Everyone else freezes, too, as though a siren has just started going off—Pidge looks up from the holographic screen displaying her results; Hunk cranes his neck as he slings his own towel over it; Shiro glances critically but silently over at them after popping his helmet off, practically daring the situation to escalate.

Their attentions converge on Keith, awaiting his response to the gauntlet that has just been unceremoniously thrown at his feet, and he glares at all of them, betrayed.

"I'm sorry?" he prompts Lance after a few seconds, even though he'd heard him.

(He is absolutely stalling. Sometimes if Lance is forced to repeat himself, he will realize how stupid the sentence is and backpedal.)

"You heard me," Lance retorts. So much for that. His arms are akimbo, and his feet are spread wide, and he levels Keith with an accusatory finger, eyebrows jumping into a dramatic glare. "I, Lance, am going to totally beat you!"

Keith's mouth twitches at the corner when he wills himself not to roll his eyes. "Beat me at what, exactly?"

Lance answers his question by striding up to him, raising two coiled fingers, and flicking him right between the eyes.

"Ow!" He swats Lance's hand away.

"At fighting, obviously," Lance says, ignoring the noise, even though he could easily have made fun of him for it; like, _easily_. "What _else_ would I be talking about?"

 _Flying or exfoliating or breathing_ , Keith thinks but doesn't say. Instead, he massages the bridge of his nose with a wounded expression, and says, "That's fine, but—you aren't really suited to hand-to-hand combat. I thought we'd established that."

Rather than sensibly looking as though Keith has just helpfully pointed out a fact that he had forgotten, Lance stiffens as though he's been pinched, looking even more indignant than he had before.

"Oh, so now you're _better_ at it than I am, huh?" he squawks, setting his hands on his hips and inclining his whole torso closer, like he's trying to be intimidating, which Keith would find hilarious if it didn't now put Lance's nose a mere two inches from his.

Keith darts his eyes to the right, then the left, then back to Lance. "I mean… yeah? That's not—I wasn't trying to _insult_ you; it's just the truth."

Lance gasps, flattening a hand over his chest. "The _truth_?!"

"Oh, come _on_." Keith drops his head back, scowling flatly at the high ceiling. "Aren't you the one who's always saying you're the 'sharpshooter?' You shoot, Lance. You're more effective from a distance. In every situation where you've had to take somebody on hand-to-hand, you've lost. It's just not—Lance?"

He watches, puzzled, as Lance storms past him (making a point of knocking into his shoulder along the way) and toward the bench where Pidge and Hunk are doing a frankly impressive job of not getting involved. Once there, he dismantles the outer layer of his paladin armor until he's down to the black undersuit, stacking the plated pieces, along with his helmet, in a haphazard pile at Pidge's side.

With a disgruntled sigh and a frustrated gesture to the heavens, Keith begrudgingly trails after him to do the same.

"You know I am _not_ going to watch your stuff for you, right?" Pidge asks them both, looking grossly offended at the fact that they had even had the nerve to put it anywhere near her. "This isn't the Garrison, Lance."

"Oh, who's gonna steal it, nerd bird?" Lance retorts with heavy sarcasm. "The mice? Just take it easy on the heckling for once, all right?"

There is a wicked gleam in Pidge's eyes that gives away just how little she plans on granting that request. Keith winces inwardly. It just _figures_ that Lance would challenge him to some kind of weird death match and expect everyone to stand around and _watch_.

In the time it takes for Keith to change, Allura and Coran have caught wind of the proceedings and rushed up to the observation deck to spectate, which is _exactly_ what Keith wants; thanks, universe. Coran presses a button with a flourish and a section of the floor near the right wall sinks out of sight to be replaced by three rows of Altean-style bleachers.

Pidge makes a nose of delight and fascination, springing over to them and plopping down in the middle of the top row. ("She likes to be tall," Keith remembers Lance saying once, an instant before she'd smacked him in the arm.) Hunk follows, giving Lance an encouraging thumbs-up on the way. Shiro, after raising his eyebrow pointedly at Keith as if to say, _Any bones end up broken, we are going to have a Talk_ , strides after them, but halts and leans against the wall at the right edge of the bleachers with his arms crossed rather than sitting.

Keith inhales through his nose and turns to meet Lance.

Standing at the center of the training room opposite him, Keith can almost picture that they're contenders in some gladiatorial arena, fighting for their honor and their homes and their lives, but then Lance loudly blows a raspberry and the illusion is broken.

"Very mature," Keith deadpans.

"So how do you wanna do this?" Lance asks. He's dancing nimbly from foot to foot, winding up his shoulders, as carefree and cocksure as ever. Keith remains still. "I come at you, you come at me, we meet somewhere in the middle?"

"How romantic!" Pidge crows through cupped hands.

"Pidge, I _know_ I didn't just hear heckling!"

Keith frowns thoughtfully, already evaluating Lance's movements, not blinking.

"I'll defend," he says at last. "You try to knock me down or ring me out within—" His Earth to Altean conversion still takes a second or two of thought, but less than it used to. "Five doboshes. Sound fair?"

Lance scoffs. "Uh, _easy_ much? You trying to hold back on me or something? I think I'm almost insulted."

Keith narrows his eyes. "I don't hold back."

"Oooooh!" Lance wiggles all of his fingers at Keith. "I'm real scared now, Mullet Boy! Bring it!"

"But," Keith says, "aren't you… the one bringing it to _me_ in this—"

Lance charges at him with a yell before he can finish. It takes Keith maybe half a second to know that he's going to start with a right hook to his face. It takes him maybe six to dodge it, grab the arm Lance had swung (too widely and slowly), and wrench it behind his back.

"Ow!" Lance yelps, sounding more shocked and offended than pained. His left arm is flailing like he doesn't know what to do with it; he keeps uselessly swatting it at Keith's hip. "What just—?"

"Wasted!" Pidge hollers in a deep voice.

"Quiznak _shut_ , Pidge!"

Keith releases him. Lance springs away and whirls on him. He looks gravely affronted, but also, if Keith is paying attention, almost upset.

"That was—I was just testing you," he sputters, wiping at his mouth with his wrist and stalking back to his starting point. "Let me try that again."

Keith shrugs. "Okay."

They stare each other down for a few seconds this time before Lance makes his move. Keith thinks he can discern some careful calculation in his eyes, although he doesn't want to be too optimistic.

He'll grant Lance this: he's pretty fast when he wants to be, and he picks up on things quickly. This time, he darts at Keith without one of his typical (telegraphing) battle cries, and he keeps his arms at his sides so that Keith can't see a hit approaching. Both would be decent tactics if he didn't know Lance, and Lance's tendency to go for the face before anything else, and Lance's total lack of confidence in his left side.

It's probably overkill, but because he's still tired and annoyed and doesn't know how to grapple with the brief desire to let Lance clock him, he blocks Lance's incoming punch with his arm, spins around, and kicks him in the midsection.

Lance hits the floor with a _thud_ from the force of it, skidding just slightly on impact. This earns a hiss of sympathy from Pidge and a fretful cry from Hunk, who is no doubt covering his eyes (but still peeking through his fingers).

Lance coughs, pushing himself up from the floor with a hand and elbow. _Should I offer to help him up?_ Keith wonders, but before he can make good on that, Lance has jerked his head up to skewer Keith with what has to be the most fearsome and hateful glare he has ever seen.

"Oh, it is _on_ , man," he snarls, surging to his feet in one go. "You are going _down_."

Something bitter crawls up Keith's throat at the sharpness to the words. Where Lance would typically be exuding an air of petty competitiveness and arrogance, there's now an incandescent resolve, the kind a hero has when facing down the villain of the story.

He feels like he ought to apologize, though he doesn't know why.

"Any day now," he goads him, to ignore the impulse, spreading his feet apart and bracing himself just slightly.

Lance's eyes flash and he bares his teeth, but Keith knows before he even starts to move how this is going to end.

While the last dobosh whittles away, he halts Lance's every hasty advance and ducks each sloppy attack, all without having to move more than one or two steps from where he's standing. It requires little thought or prediction. Everyone fights the same way when they're trying too hard to win.

"Time!" Pidge announces, just as Keith slams Lance face-first to the floor, pinning both of his arms at his spine and forcefully holding his head down with the other.

The silence that follows is oppressive. The adrenaline and instinct that govern Keith's body in a fight recede, and in his ensuing awareness, he notices that he's breathing more heavily than he has any reason to be, and that his stomach is churning. His knee digs mercilessly into Lance's lower back.

Lance is panting, too, but there's a strange, whining quality to it, and it causes his body to shake in Keith's hold. Keith catches sight of his face, in profile, and feels like he's going to be sick.

"Keith." It's the first time Shiro's said a word since this started. "It's over. I think you can let him go now."

Keith hardly registers the meaning, at first, too paralyzed by the sight of the tears now starting to slip from Lance's eyes, hitting the floor with no sound.

"Keith!" Hunk warns him.

Stiffly, he lifts his hands away from Lance's head and arms, only retreating when Lance, sniffling and choking, flattens his palms on the floor to begin pushing himself up.

When he stands, his back is to Keith. The clatter of approaching footsteps almost drowns out the pitiful sound he makes when he wipes his face with his sleeve. Almost.

Pidge and Hunk rush straight past Keith and go to Lance. Keith doesn't miss the resentful, almost frightened look Hunk shoots him over his shoulder on the way. Pidge lays her hand tentatively on Lance's upper arm, looking up at the face Keith can't see with genuine concern. She says something too hushed for Keith to hear.

Hunk pulls Lance into a hug, because that's what he does, and mutters something from which Keith is able to snatch the words "Keith" and "jerk." (Lance's shoulders tense, but he doesn't push him off.)

Keith detects a presence at his shoulder and, after a moment, inclines his head to see Shiro, watching him wearily, arms folded at his chest.

He knows the pose and what it means. Shame curdles in his mouth for reasons he still can't explain. He tries to avert his eyes, but they just land on the scene in front of him, and he doesn't particularly want to look at that, either, so he settles for focusing on his feet, curling his hands into loose fists at his sides.

Shiro doesn't say anything, but his implications are almost palpable enough for Keith to feel, bearing down on him until he bends.

"Lance, I…"

He swallows. Pidge, Hunk, and Lance go quiet, but Lance doesn't turn around.

"I'm sorry," he says to the floor. "You—you're a really good shooter." He inhales, but it catches on something in his throat. "You're just… this just isn't your forte."

There is a feeling he remembers from the Garrison, one that he would get during target practice when he would miss what had seemed to be right in front of him by a mortifyingly wide margin.

His stomach plunges with that feeling, right then.

Lance chokes out a bitter scoff and, without a word, starts forward toward the bench where his armor waits. Pidge and Hunk do not follow him, but watch him go with a profound understanding that Keith almost wishes he could share, just for once, in this instant, when it counts most.

Lance gathers the components of his armor into his arms, still sniffling noisily, and when he has them all, he gracelessly starts toward the door that leads back to the castle proper, which slides open at his approach.

What he mutters on his way, coarse and low, slams into Keith like the punches he couldn't land.

"Go to hell, Keith."

And Keith could let him go. He really could. What difference do Lance's feelings make to him, anyway, so prideful and fragile that the slightest nudge seems to cut them to the core?

What difference has any of it ever made?

"It's not your forte, but—but that's why I'm here," he says in a voice not his own, turning swiftly to face Lance's retreating back. The words stop Lance mid-stride. "To protect you."

No one speaks. Lance is still facing away from him, but his right fingers loosely contort into the shape of a fist.

"In a fight," Keith continues, because he presumes that the silence is meant to indicate that he should keep going. "From enemies. So you can shoot better. So you don't die. Because we're a team."

He softens and exhales, eyes drifting down. Though it should have returned to a normal pace by now, his heart is still hammering at his ribs, insistent and volatile.

"Look, I suck at shooting," he murmurs. " _Obviously_. But that's never bothered me, because… because I know you're good at it. I know you'll have my back."

His open mouth stills around a sentiment that takes a tick or two to coalesce into something he nearly knows how to say.

"I count on you," he says. "I always have. I want you to count on me, too."

Mercifully, whatever foolish part of his brain has possessed the rest of him seems to decide that he's sufficiently enabled Lance to never take him seriously again, and there are no words left to say.

Every moment that Lance doesn't answer or Pidge doesn't dryly interject leaves him feeling more and more like a supreme idiot until he has decided that he would like nothing better than to sink into the floor, never to return. He's just about to start willing himself to do just that, and/or to hope that the castle has some sort of advanced telepathic AI capable of instantly vaporizing him if he wishes for it when Lance finally turns around, eyes comically wide, blushing to the ears.

"Wow," Pidge says under her breath.

"I didn't imagine that, right?" Hunk stage-whispers, probably directly into Pidge's ear. "Did that just happen? Did he just say all that?"

"I think he did," Pidge stage-whispers back. "I think he straight-up did."

"That's the spirit," Shiro says warmly, almost privately, like he's about to start applauding.

Keith could die. Instinctively, he covers his burning face with both hands, muffling a mortified groan with his palms. He almost wants Lance to start howling with his distinctive, raucous laughter, just to have something to break the silence.

It doesn't even surprise him anymore that Lance will not do what he wants.

"You—" Lance starts to say, and in the fraught quiet it has the force and shock value of a gunshot. "I…"

When Keith peeks in a very stealthy and dignified way through the middle and ring fingers of his right hand, he sees that Lance is staring urgently at the floor, head bowed, lips folded in, eyes still protuberant, cheeks still pink. And he has faced down maybe two thousand Galra soldiers and sentries total, by now, and he has flown an ancient sentient lion robot, and he has locked eyes with death enough times to know not to blink, but this, this sense of being brought to bay, waiting for Lance to speak, is nearly enough to pull the strength from his legs. He misses the desert, and its simplicity, and the conviction that everything was visible to the naked eye if one looked hard enough, even the boundless stars.

"Teach me."

Keith lifts his head slowly, mouth agog, hands hovering in place. Lance is scratching the side of his nose with one long finger, eyebrows knitted and gaze still riveted to the floor.

"Huh?" Keith says intelligently.

"Teach me what you did to beat me," Lance expounds, and when he straightens and meets Keith's eye, he almost looks taller, grander, more difficult to topple. His mouth slips into an askew grin. "Somebody's gotta make sure _you_ don't die, right?" Pidge coughs loudly. "Somebody… besides… our five other perfectly capable teammates…"

And it could mean so many things, things Keith is still learning—things like _I think if push ever came to shove I might die for you_ and _This only works if we protect each other, doesn't it_ and _It's true; you really do suck at shooting_ —and he could say any number of things back—things like _I've always done a pretty good job of protecting myself, you know_ and _Right now, in this exact second, I think I remember the first time we met, on orientation day_ and _Give yourself more credit, just once_ —but all he does is inhale, until the air of the castle fills his lungs, cold and clear, and release it all as a bare huff of a chuckle.

"Yeah, okay," he says, shaking his head.

Pidge, Hunk, and Shiro promptly announce that they will be bowing out for the day to spend the last of their downtime before dinner doing something, as Pidge puts it, more productive than watching Keith and Lance having a slap-fight.

"But hey," she adds, firing her finger guns on the way to the door, "nice work on the whole airing your feelings thing, guys. Proud of you."

"I am also proud of you both, and Lance specifically," Hunk says. (Lance blows him a kiss.) "Later!"

Shiro pats Keith's shoulder fleetingly enough that he doubts the others even notice, and when Keith turns his head to look at him, he's met with a smile that is both gratified and highly amused.

"You two really are something else," he says quietly to Keith, who frankly resents his tone. "We'll be in the common area if you need us."

Over the PA system, Coran begins an impassioned and nostalgic monologue about the inspiring fire of youth before Allura, in her infinite wisdom and mercy, drags him out by the ear.

It isn't long after they've all left and Keith has begun the arduous process of teaching Lance something that he realizes how patently terrible he is at basic instructive things like patience, clarity, and articulation. He loses count of how many times Lance demands to know how he had known to move like he did and he helplessly replies that he just _had_.

"Where did you learn to fight like that, anyway?" Lance asks him, panting, when they're toweling off half a varga later, after receiving word from Hunk that dinner is ready.

Keith stills, fingers curling imperceptibly into the fabric of the towel, and lets his eyes wander downward, coming to rest at an indistinct point. The same growling, rumbling voice, both protective and frightening, that edges into his dreamless rest most nights gathers at the base of his skull for a moment, urging him with only a single word: _Survive_.

(He will know that voice soon enough; he will call it _Mom_ , and recoil from it, and from the sight of his dark veins and his purple eyes and the weight of the truth they give away.)

"Life, I guess," he answers.

At that, finally, though it takes a moment, Lance, with a great sputter, bursts into laughter, as though he's been saving it, as though it was made for this moment, and this answer, and this pleasurable warmth washing over Keith's cheeks, even as he looks away and tells him to shut up, for the love of God.

* * *

 **III.**

"Oh, what do _you_ want?" Lance snarls. "Let me guess. You lost the round of nose goes?"

Lance can run faster than Keith can. Keith wouldn't admit it to anybody—not out of soreness over it, or anything; rather out of an aversion to the absurd face Lance makes whenever he's bested Keith at something—but it was true on the day of their class' first physical exam at the Garrison and it's true now. True enough, in fact, that as Keith stands in the doorway to the castle's rearmost observation room, pinned in place by Lance's bitter glower, he has to fight to keep from giving away that he's out of breath from the brief chase that had led them here from the hangar.

He doesn't know what to do with either of Lance's questions, both of them scathing and spiteful, tones that have never matched Lance's voice as Keith has come to know it. He can't quite see Lance's face—the room is dark, and the swirling sea of stars behind his silhouette is the only thing to illuminate him—but he can picture the expression on it more clearly than he would like.

He can't help feeling like they've been here before—him and Lance and a room with no lights and a nearly tangible thing between them, like a single beating heart.

"No," he answers when nothing else comes to him. His dry mouth is making him croak.

Lance turns away from him without another word. They're both still in their armor, but Lance isn't wearing his helmet; it's probably still on the hangar floor where he'd thrown it moments earlier as though it had been burning him. It's only when Keith's breath fogs up the surface of his own that he realizes he hasn't taken it off yet.

Silently, he does. Half-dried sweat makes his hair stick to the back of his neck uncomfortably. He stares at the scarlet surface of the helmet in his two hands, at the curved white tips of the V emblem at the crest of it. It feels heavier than he remembers.

"You miss your family," he says at last, without really thinking.

Lance turns his head so that the profile of his face cuts against the stars, but doesn't move from where he is, feet set apart, arms folded at his chest. "Excuse me?"

Keith runs his thumbs along the luminescent blue line separating the red portion of the helmet from the white.

"I get it," he murmurs, because he's been trying and trying to, with everything in him.

"No, you don't," Lance retorts bluntly.

Keith opens his mouth to argue, eyes rising with a spurt of courage to rest on Lance again, but decides halfway through the next lie that there's little point. The planet they had just returned from trying and failing to save had been nearly obliterated by the Galra, and it had looked almost like Earth. There had been an ocean, once, but no longer.

"No, I don't," he quietly admits.

It feels shameful. Someone _should_ get it, for Lance's sake. And all of them have tried, or have at least empathized with facets of it—Pidge understands missing family, Hunk understands missing home, Shiro understands missing who you used to be, Coran understands missing friends, Allura understands missing peace—but never the whole. Never the full, deep agony of it that seems to overwhelm Lance in ways none of them can quite fathom, Keith least of all.

"I… I envy you sometimes," he tells Lance now, in that same hoarse voice that makes it sound like he's been crying or shouting or both. "It sounds stupid, but—I mean, I… I feel like I don't really have anything _to_ miss. Not…"

He swallows and ducks his head again. "Not like that."

Lance is silent for a long time, and Keith can't bring himself to look him in the eye to try to discern why. His whole body is sore and he hasn't had anything resembling water in hours and he doesn't have the energy for the anxiety that comes with uncertainty.

He's starting to wonder why he'd even followed Lance in the first place. He hadn't even paused to consider it, just taken off after him as if on some ancient instinct, the same that courses through Red when they're hurtling through space and she knows something that he does not. He feels useless and embarrassed now that he's got to do more than chase after Lance's retreating back, shouting for him to wait.

"This hurts, Keith," Lance whispers, in a small voice, like he's afraid to say it out loud. "It hurts all the time. Every day and night that we're here and not there. If you envy that, you need to get that mullet head examined, pronto."

"Could you please stop calling it a mullet?" Keith snaps. "It's not a mullet."

After a beat, Lance brays out a laugh that nearly sounds genuine. "Keith, we have visited maybe—what, a dozen-plus universes since we became space heroes?—and there is not a single one in which that thing is _not_ a mullet."

"You don't need to like," Keith huffs through his nose, " _point it out_ all the time, is all I'm saying."

"Oh, wow, is this—are you _embarrassed_?" Lance asks, and the very sound of it awakens a severe need in Keith's soul to march forward and punch him square in the face. "Keith, my buddy, my man, if you want somebody to like, take care of it for you, or something, I _know_ Allura has some Altean hair shears lying around _somewhere_ , and for what it's worth, I was the designated haircut-giver in my house from the time I was twelve, so I…"

"I like my hair, Lance!"

"Me, too!" Lance replies hastily, and then coughs. "I mean, uh, as in, I like _my_ hair. Too." He pauses, and now that Keith's eyes have properly adjusted to the darkness, he can faintly distinguish his features, which have relaxed to accommodate an almost wistful smile. "What were we talking about before? When you came in here?"

"Your family," Keith answers, "and how you… miss them."

"That was a rhetorical question, genius; I was trying to say thanks for making me forget about it for a while." Lance sighs, and goes quiet for a bit. Then, softly, like it's a confession, an admission of defeat, he beckons with one arm and says to the floor, "Come here, man."

Keith lingers warily where he is. "Why?"

Lance huffs. "What do you mean, ' _why_?' There's a nice view, I want to apologize, and you look seriously pathetic just standing there."

Hesitantly, Keith starts slowly walking toward him, stilling between each step to regard him with a questioning frown.

"You want to apologize?" he asks eventually, when there are maybe two paces between him and Lance's back. "What for?"

Lance shrugs, face tilted toward the heavens. "I mean, you know. Everything, I guess?"

"Everything?" Keith echoes, blinking rapidly at a point just near Lance's shoulder. "You _guess_?"

"Jeez, Keith, I know that everything I say is interesting and articulate always, but I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by repeating it to me."

"Maybe I'm hoping that it will suddenly make _sense_?" Keith retorts.

Lance lifts a hand to scratch his head, letting out a pensive hum. "I just mean I've—with you—" And Keith must be in the midst of some complex fever dream, because that is truthfully the only scenario he can picture in which Lance, to whom words seem to flock in infinite supply, occasionally to his detriment, would be struggling to string together a sentence. "Since day _one_ , you know? And that wasn't cool of me."

Keith stares at him. "You've _what_ with me since day one? You just skipped, like, five sentences."

Lance makes a frustrated noise that's almost comical, scrubbing a hand over his face and setting the other on his hip. At last, Keith musters the bravery to stand beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder, following his gaze out to a cluster of blue-green stars in the northern distance and waiting.

Patience yields focus, as Shiro always tells him.

"All I'm trying to say is," Lance says, bowing his head, "for every time I've been a jerk, I'm sorry. All this has just been… a lot. Like, a _lot_. But, you know, end of the day, we're on the same team, and—and you did come after me. And that means a lot to me."

Keith loosens, his shoulders going slack. "It's—It's no problem. Really."

"Something doesn't have to be big for you to miss it," Lance says. "And anyway, it isn't a contest to see who feels sadder. You're right; I miss my family. You miss stars, like you said that one time. Those are both… I mean, they're equally—"

"Tell me about them," Keith interjects, and before he can think on it, he's set a hand on Lance's shoulder, making him jolt. "Your family."

That finally gets Lance to turn his head to look at him with protuberant eyes and a gobsmacked expression. His gaze darts from Keith's hand to Keith's face and back again as if to make sure that Keith is seeing what he's doing and that he is not touching an inanimate, non-Lance object as he had perhaps assumed.

"Tell me everything," Keith murmurs.

"I've got a really big family, man," Lance says (in a voice just slightly higher than usual). "We could be here all night."

"That's fine," Keith says.

"You don't have to pretend to care, or anything—"

"I'm not pretending," Keith says, feeling increasingly stupid. What he says next, however, is possibly the most stupid thing of all. "I want to hear it all. I want you to—to tell me so much about them that I start to miss them, too, and then—you won't have to do it by yourself, at least."

For a moment, Lance looks so monumentally moved that Keith is briefly terrified he's about to start crying. But he doesn't. Instead, he pulls in a shuddering breath, swipes at his subtly glistening eyes with the back of his wrist, and grins.

"Okay, well," he says, "get comfy, buddy. Never thought I'd say _this_ , but—let me introduce you to my parents."

And here is something that Keith will never confess, though he will one day tell Pidge on a New Year's Eve that he has never been able to outrun Lance: he had never seen the value of Earth, not really, not entirely, not enough that he felt driven to protect it with his life, until he heard Lance talk about it. Only then, its richness and life reflected in Lance's yearning eyes, had it ever felt like home. Like a place worth dying for.

* * *

 **IV.**

Whenever Lance would scrape his joints falling out of a tree or taking the turn at the end of the cul de sac a bit too tightly on his rollerblades, his mom would reward him for braving the ferocious sting of the iodine with neon Scooby-Doo band-aids and a slice of her homemade jelly-filled cake roll. These two things, in combination, had always seemed to be the miracle cure for any injury, be it bee sting or broken arm, and anything less had proven itself to be historically inadequate.

He remembers the first time he had skinned his knee running laps around the Garrison campus for physical training, and how it had seemed to throb twice as painfully beneath the plain square of gauze from the infirmary, how his pride had withered in his mouth as the rest of the cadets had gone on sprinting past him, not glancing back for even a second.

His knowledge and understanding of treating injuries had never gone beyond the cotton swab in his mom's fingers (her nails never painted, always with a bit of dirt or flour under them) or the metallic taste of his own blood on his tongue as he surreptitiously licked it from his elbow, slapping a gob of spit onto the wound and calling it a day. He had never had to apply stitches, to set a broken bone—oh, sure, Veronica had made him watch some of her weird medical documentaries when she'd been studying to get into med school, and he'd only fainted at the sight of an open heart surgery, like, once—and to tell you the truth, he hadn't had any desire to learn. He doesn't like blood. Or people screaming in pain. Or the way a bone looks when it's broken. Nope. No, thank you. He would get by just fine. (He had Veronica.)

But he kind of wishes he had a medical degree right about now, hearing Keith's labored breathing on the other end of the comm link.

Stupid, stupid, _stupid_.

"Paladins, I've pinpointed Keith's location and transferred the information to your lions' navigation systems," Coran is telling them, as Lance hurtles through space in Red with his heart practically at his teeth. "Lance, Princess, you're the closest—Lance should be arriving in about ten doboshes—Princess, you'll be there in twelve. The rest of you, return to the castle immediately to help me prepare a cryo-pod—and patch up your own injuries!" Under his breath, he mutters, "A fine quintant to skip pod-cleaning, this was…"

"Thank you, Coran," Allura replies evenly, but there is a steely edge to her voice that Lance has begun to recognize as fear. "Keith—" The name seems to shatter to pieces. "Stay right where you are. We're on our way."

And what Keith says (rather than _thanks_ , rather than _take your time_ , rather than _any_ of his usual inscrutable monosyllabic answers) is something that sends Lance's stomach lurching to his knees: nothing but a hoarse, ashamed, "Sorry."

Then his connection cuts out.

Lance clenches his jaw and reels in the instinct to shout. The sight of the mighty Black Lion careening lifelessly toward the pitted scarlet surface of the nearby planet Anides is still branded into the forefront of his mind, and the sounds of the Galra ships firing (of the screech of burning metal, of Keith's panicked shout of his name) still spur at his instincts, though the ambush has long since been dealt with. He'd been careless and stupid and useless, like usual, like always, hanging out directly in the sights of a battleship's ion cannon, and the only reason he wasn't a charred piece of paladin barbecue right now was—

"Lance, do you copy?"

Coran's voice cuts sharply into the cockpit and Lance jolts in his chair. He fleetingly licks his lips to try to return some feeling to his dry mouth, but it doesn't do much.

"Yeah, yes, I copy," he stutters. "Red's honing in on the coordinates now. ETA nine doboshes."

"Good," Coran says. "Signing off."

His feed doesn't click off right away, though—he lingers at it for an instant longer than he ought to, searching the heavens for the proper words, and then they come.

"Bring him home."

This is usually the part where Lance would fire back an affirmative remark, full of bluster and confidence, but he comes up empty. His eyes keep straying back to the coordinates in the lower right of his navigation screen, nothing more than a string of numbers in a language he barely understands to tell him that Keith (Keith, who saved his life; Keith, who is reckless and solitary; Keith, who misses the Pleiades) is alive.

"We will," Allura vows.

He knows it's bad, but he doesn't pay attention too closely to what she says after that—something about going dormant on the comm link to lend full power to running diagnostics on Blue's systems to assess the damage from the battle—and it's only after she gently asks him to confirm that he received the transmission that he wrenches his awareness back into place.

"Allura," he says, "you okay?"

"I'm fine," she answers, in even keel that makes his own lack thereof seem totally disgraceful. "Are you?"

He can't seem to bring himself to say outright that he is, so he settles for, "I'm not hurt."

"I'm truly glad of it," she murmurs, so earnest and warm that it presses against his heart like a comforting hand. "It will be all right, Lance. Keith is stronger than you give him credit for. Signing off until I reach the landing zone. Be careful."

"You, too."

In the ensuing silence, the cold, bottomless silence of space, some of the adrenaline pulsing through his limbs and his skull starts to dissolve. It's all he can do to keep from crying to expel the excess, a habitual response that had always haunted him at the Garrison and haunts him still. His hands are shaking, jostling the controls with the force of it, and his teeth won't stop chattering.

He feels Red's energy rumble against his in response to his crumbling composure, equal parts concern and quiet reproach. (It's nothing like Blue's—hers, comforting and cool, would always submerge him in calm when his eyes would start to well up, promising him that there was no shame in it.)

"Leave me alone," he grits out, even though he knows that isn't the language the lion speaks—even though he knows disrespecting Red could get him spontaneously ejected into space if he isn't careful.

But Red heeds his request, and within a second he can feel nothing of her but her resolve to reach Anides's surface, closer now than it had been before, but not nearly close enough. That resolve is focused and singular, sharpened to a point—Keith, and nothing else.

He can't help the hollow laugh that escapes him at that, despite everything. It makes a hard sound against his teeth.

"I guess we're both suckers, huh?" he whispers.

"Y-You can say that again."

Lance chokes on his own spit, jerking his head away from the slowly approaching planet to the holographic screen typically reserved for visual communication.

"Keith?!" he croaks. "Keith— _Keith_ , is that you?"

Most of the communication systems had made it out of the dogfight unscathed, but Keith's crash landing had damaged a good portion of his, and where Lance would typically be treated to a semi-pixelated view of his scowling face, he now only sees the occasional spurt of sound waves on a horizontal line and two Altean words that he's pretty sure (thanks to the debacle on Thayserix) mean something like AUDIO ONLY.

A couple of garbled, disjointed syllables are his only answer, at first—and Lance hates the tension in his throat, hates how his voice had broken in half on Keith's name—but then the connection seems to stabilize as Keith asks, "Can you hear me now?"

"Yes!" Lance gasps, just like he used to back on Earth when his mom would call him from her piece-of-crap TracFone. "Yeah, Keith, I hear you! Can you hear _me_?"

"Yeah," Keith replies, more an exhale than a word. "You're… coming in pretty clear for now."

Lance opens his mouth to say something, some spluttering exclamation of joy that will no doubt embarrass him later, but then he remembers.

He remembers how his name had sounded in Keith's voice just before the cannon had fired, and he remembers Allura screaming over the comm link, "Keith, don't be foolish," and he remembers how he had anticipated, for an instant, the burning and inescapable impact, and how swiftly his stomach had dropped when it hadn't come. The Black Lion had passed in front of Red's line of sight only fleetingly after blocking the shot, its once-glowing eyes now dimmed, its entire right side charred and mangled.

(Well, as mangled as indestructible mythic comet armor can get.)

He remembers that it had taken about six seconds for the pieces to fall into place. He remembers that the only thing he'd managed to say, a dozen times over, was a helpless, worthless, "No."

Something like rage rushes into him, then. Maybe that's not really what it is (maybe it never has been), but he's too tired and too scared to bother reading into it further. He tightens his grip on the controls until his hands begin to shake from something much greater than the fear that had seized them before.

"I didn't need your help, you stupid moron!" he shouts harshly before he can stop himself, and he's never regretted anything so fast in his life.

There's a beat before Keith replies, "Wh— _What_?"

Lance grits his teeth and shuts his eyes until his temples start to ache.

"I said I didn't need your help!" he snarls. There's no grace or consideration to it. His voice won't stop cracking. "Oh, sure, Lance wasn't watching his left; Lance put the mission in danger _again_ ; better swoop in and _rescue_ him, _again_ , just to _show him up_!"

"What? That wasn't—"

" _Me_? Seriously, _me_? Not Pidge or Hunk or _Shiro_ or _Allura_ or—or somebody we can't—" The last word breaks apart and vanishes before he can say it: _replace_. "It's gotta be _me_?! What, are you gonna fry the Black Lion every time I screw up? What the—what were you _thinking_?! Are you _insane_?!"

"Lance—"

" _And now you might die_!" he screams before he can stop himself. "Keith, what if you die? _Huh_? What if you die and it's because of _me_?!"

The last question bursts out so loudly that its harsh echoes seem to ring in the cockpit for an eternity. Lance notices offhandedly that he's gasping as though he's just resurfaced from being underwater for a long time, so spent from the tirade that his heart is hammering at a breakneck pace.

"Are you done?" Keith asks at last.

"Are _you_ done?" Lance snaps, which means literally nothing and he knows it.

Keith sighs. It sounds heavier and more strained than it should, but it's still undeniably a Keith Sigh. Lance can find a little bit of comfort in that.

"And don't say you're sorry," he says before Keith can speak. "Don't say stupid stuff like that. You—"

The truth and gravity of it settles at his shoulders and stays there, and will for all time: "You _saved_ me."

"Yeah, and this is the thanks I get," Keith grunts.

Lance's mouth thins. " _Keith_ …"

"No, I get it," Keith murmurs. He sounds closer and clearer than he had before. Lance hears a rustle, like something shifting, and tries to ignore the pained noise Keith makes at the end of it. "I'd be pissed, too. If you'd—done it for me."

"Gee, _thanks_ ," Lance says, instead of, _Don't say that like you know I would_.

"I'm not going to die, Lance," Keith tells him. It sounds just as steely and impartial as every other conviction he's ever shared. "Not this time, anyway."

Lance groans. "You were doing fine before that last part!"

"When I do," Keith continues over him, "someday—which is something _everybody does_ , okay—it's not going to be because of you."

And oh, Lance thinks. So that's what Keith sounds like when he lies.

"You suck," he blurts out.

"I— _excuse_ me?"

"What the heck kind of comforting statement is that supposed to be?" He deepens his voice to properly impersonate the deadpan grimness of Keith's: "'I'm fine, Lance, but everybody you love will die someday, so get ready for that.' _What_? What—" Maybe it isn't anger anymore, not really; maybe it's guilt and frustration and a strange, gaping loneliness. " _What is your damage_?"

Instead of defending himself as he always does, Keith releases a subtle breath and whispers, unguarded, "Everybody you love, huh…?"

Lance freezes, gaze shooting to the screen as if it will find a visual representation of the rueful smile he's almost certain he recognized at the edges of Keith's words. His heart leaps up his throat in an instant.

"Don't change the subject!" he sputters, red-faced. "We—We can talk about that later, okay?"

"Okay," Keith says faintly.

Lance shakes his head to focus. "Can we get back to the part where your life is in mortal danger and I've got just over five doboshes to _maybe_ fix that? _How_ are you this calm?!"

"Is—" Keith pauses. "Are you actually… asking, or…"

"Because, I mean, it's okay if you aren't!" Lance babbles. "You don't have to be calm _all_ the time, you know? I won't judge you or anything! Heck, I—I'd be scared out of my mind if I were you!"

"Do you _want_ me to be scared?" Keith bluntly asks. "It sounds like you want me to be scared, Lance."

Lance grimaces. "No, no, of course not; I just—I mean… you aren't even a _little_ bit scared? Like, _at all_?"

"I—" He can't tell if the hitch in Keith's voice comes from a break in the signal or something else. "I… I don't know? Am I supposed to be?"

There's an interlude of static that Lance can't find the words to fill.

"I mean, what good would that do me, really?" Keith continues. "That's not what's gonna get me home at the end of the day."

Stars and fragmented asteroids rush past Lance in dim blurs. He can feel the vast cosmic awareness of Red rumbling around him, within him, in his blood and his bones and his chest, so much greater and more profound than anything he has ever known.

In a single, descending instant, he perceives the difference between him and Keith more starkly than he ever has before, a vast canyon he can scarcely fathom crossing—while he stands immobile before it, focused on every possible complication, Keith is on the other side, thinking only in approaches and solutions, breathing steadily, never wavering—never afraid.

It isn't the first view he's had from some inconsequential spot in Keith's wake, but in that moment, he feels so alone and so stupid that it nearly crushes him.

"Lance?"

"Yeah." He pulls himself back and darts his eyes to the comm screen, empty save for the audio line, flaring each time Keith speaks or breathes, wavering with the defiant life of him. "I'm listening; I'm here."

"Look, don't—" His hiss of pain manifests as a rush of static and a hard twist in Lance's gut. "Don't use me as an example. Okay? I'm nothing special, or anything." With unusual adamance, he repeats, "I'm really not."

Lance almost argues with him without thinking. Almost.

"I just… it's just that it's never solved anything for me. Being scared, I mean. So I save it for—for when there's nothing left."

The last part is frail and quiet, and the poor connection makes it seem to flicker like a wind-battered candle in the dark. Lance's whole chest seizes with something he elects not to confront.

"Well, there's plenty left, all right? So shut up." His voice comes out thicker and with more cracks in it than he had planned, and his eyes feel hot, and he fully cannot believe he is about to start crying in Keith's lion. (It will always be Keith's lion, to him—maybe that's part of the problem.) "Just shut up and—and wait for m—for us. Okay? We're coming, and there's plenty left, so quit being—quit thinking like that. Okay? Just for, like, two damn seconds."

He receives no response, at first, and the silence lasts just a tick long enough for panic to creep up his spine, but then the audio line ripples again—the scientific measurement of Keith's laugh, wan and subdued, but nonetheless constant, effortless, like the push of the blue tide around Lance's ankles.

"Okay," Keith says quietly. The lone word fills the whole cockpit. "Lance, I..."

It takes Lance a beat to notice that, in ensuing silence, he's leaned forward in his seat, eyes fixed on the star-littered emptiness ahead as though he will find Keith's next thought in it.

"Yeah?" he prompts him, hating the strain in his throat and how obvious it is when he speaks. " _Yeah_ , Keith?"

Keith's breath shudders when it comes over the comm again, shallow and bare, but still there. "Thanks."

It feels wrong, some poorly conjured illusion to mask a greater truth. Lance has to let go of one of the controls to wipe tears and snot from his nose, and he has a feeling it makes a horrible, very noticeable sound, but if it does, Keith doesn't comment on it.

"No problem," Lance chokes out, and he urges Red to go faster, _faster_ , with everything in him, with such hope and might that he can almost imagine it moves the stars.

It isn't long before a triangle lights up on Red's screen, flashing around a point between the jagged crimson crags onto which they've begun to descend. Pieces of data start to spring up at its edges—a heat signature here, a heartbeat there, and, at the center, a word in Altean, graceful in its austerity: _Found._

Lance's fragile human breath snags in his chest, right where his heart should be. In the annals of his memory, his mother gently finishes laying a Band-Aid across his elbow and kisses the spot that hurts the most. "Cry all you want, darling," she says, while her fingers graze the ends of his hair, "but kisses are magic. And once you've felt a pain, your body remembers it, so it will not hurt so bad next time."

He thinks he'd like to show Keith the sea, maybe, from all coastlines and in all weather, foaming whitecaps and a horizon line so blurred you can't tell where the sky begins—the sea, his favorite thing in all the universe, even now. In his imagination, Keith would turn to him, and smile, and say it was nice, and there would be no remnant of this day except a scar on his abdomen, long and puckered and white.

"I see you, buddy," Lance says now, and he hears Keith answer, hoarse and raw but alive, still alive, immortal: "I see you, too."

* * *

 **V.**

"That's it," Lance declares, flinging his hands in the air and surging to his feet from where he's seated on the common area couch. "That is fully and totally _it_ , Keith; I am _done_. Patently done with this tension! We're going out in Red. _Right now_."

Keith, all dignity briefly forgotten, gawks at him, wide-eyed, over the pages of the decrepit mass market copy of _The Grapes of Wrath_ that he had found on an Unilu swap moon earlier in the quintant, and that he had been reading in perfect silence up until Lance's sudden outburst.

"We're what-now?" he asks, but Lance has already reached brazenly forward and closed a hand around his wrist, hauling him to his feet with a great tug. He barely has time to drop the book on the couch, although he definitely lost his page.

"We," Lance repeats with great care, even as he drags a half-tripping Keith through the door to the hangar passage, "are going out in Red. Right now. This instant. No escape."

Keith only then manages to find his footing, falling into hasty step behind Lance, too dazed by the suddenness of the situation to even tug his arm out of Lance's firm grasp.

"And we're doing that…" he mumbles, raising an eyebrow, "why, exactly?"

"It's been a big bundle of quintants," Lance explains breezily, like he's discussing the technical aspects of the pool's reverse gravity system. "For all of us, yeah, but especially for you. Shiro coming back from the sort-of dead, that Shiro turning out to be an evil Galra clone hell-bent on our destruction, you having to fight Evil Shiro by yourself on, what, the astral plane or whatever? Doesn't matter—you need a break. And I, Lance, your right hand man as declared by the universe itself, _as you may recall_ , in my infinite kindness, am stepping up to the plate to provide. You're welcome."

Keith stares at him. "I didn't thank you."

"Yeah, but you're _gonna_ , is what I'm saying," Lance sighs, gesturing dismissively with his free hand. He still hasn't let go of Keith's wrist; his middle finger is curled around the protruding bone. "And I know you miss your homegirl Red. She misses you, too. Never shuts up about you, practically. Really makes a guy feel loved!"

Keith hopes that he's joking. Really, Lance and Red seem to have bonded the best out of all of them since their impromptu round of musical lions what sometimes feels like a varga ago. Still, the thought that Red misses him is a little bit touching. The thought that she'd admit it, technically, is even more so.

"We're not in our armor," Keith says, instead of _does she really?_ or _how do you know?_ "Shouldn't we—?"

"Eh, doesn't matter," Lance replies. He turns his head to wink cheerfully at Keith. "Casual Fridays, right?"

Keith doesn't recall that ever becoming a thing, but he isn't about to push the issue. He's learned now that nitpicking every nonsensical thing that Lance says is an endeavor that always takes up more breath than it's worth.

"Whatever you say," he mutters resignedly.

Lance's assessment of the dozen or so quintants since they'd found Shiro—or, at least, the forgery of him that had held the heated edge of his white-hot bionic hand to Keith's throat in the dark cockpit of the Black Lion and snarled at him to relinquish his control to Zarkon, to the empire—isn't too far off, but Keith's method of dealing with it has largely been to ignore its implications completely.

He had faced down the clone of Shiro in the liminal space that he'd come to learn was the Black Lion's consciousness, and he had been losing, pried open at the center by Zarkon's hand, of which the clone's had been an extension—he doesn't really remember much now, only that it had been Lance who had happened to walk in, who had seen the clone pinning Keith to the floor in a chokehold after he had tried to flee the lion, and who had slammed a hand on the button that opened the airlock, sending the clone into the vacuum of space and just barely grabbing Keith's arm in time to prevent him from following.

It's a long story. Keith doubts he'll ever be in the mood to tell it. His right shoulder still twinges most of the time from Lance's haphazard rescue, which had dislocated it.

"You don't have to do this, you know," Keith mutters, eyes on the floor and on Lance's briskly moving feet.

Lance snorts without looking back at him. "Yeah, I know I don't _have_ to, dingus. I do a lot of stuff for you I don't _have_ to. What are friends for?"

 _Friends_. Keith turns the word carefully over in his head, working to memorize its intricacies.

"I'm fine," he says abruptly, eyebrows pinching, even though Lance hadn't asked.

Lance inclines his chin and his eyes swerve to rest on him only briefly, but there's something in them Keith doesn't expect, something like compassion, and it startles him.

"Sure," Lance says.

Keith bristles at the doubt in his tone, and at how poor a job he'd done of hiding it, like he'd barely been trying.

"I _am_ ," he insists maybe a touch too emphatically.

At that, strangely enough, Lance laughs. It's more subdued than his usual fare. "Yeah, okay, man. I believe you."

It sounds a little more convincing that time, but Keith knows better than to take it to heart. No one on the team has believed that for a long time.

They walk the rest of the way in silence, legs swinging in tandem, and Lance eventually lets his hand fall away from Keith's arm, leaving an empty spot over his pulse. Lance moves with confidence and purpose in long, loping strides that Keith still has to work to keep pace with.

The castle is dark and quiet. Everyone had gone to bed a while ago, although Keith is sure Pidge is staying up in some room or another pecking away at something, bags under her eyes and one of Hunk's homemade energy drinks in her hand.

He feels like he ought to say something, but Lance doesn't seem bothered by the lull in the conversation. He's whistling a pop tune Keith vaguely recognizes, hands in the back pockets of his jeans, eyes on the curved ceiling.

Lance seems different, almost, though Keith couldn't explain how if you threatened him at knifepoint, and he doesn't know when it had happened. His demeanor is still insouciant and his posture is still awful, but there's something in his face, or in the way he carries himself, or in the way he speaks just a little bit slower, that's so unlike the Lance Keith remembers from that night in the desert, when they had plunged off a cliff with Shiro in tow and had not looked back, when Lance had been a stranger who had recognized him in an instant, ten steps ahead of him even then, in an entirely unknown orbit.

Keith slows when they reach the lions' bay, though Lance continues on toward Red without pause. He cranes his neck to gaze up at the Black Lion in passing (there is no abbreviated nickname for that one; _the Black Lion_ is a title, a duty, bearing down on any who speak it), and feels its consciousness push briefly against his before retreating. Sometimes, it feels as though it still contains traces of Shiro's, but Keith has learned now to ignore it.

"Dude, will you quit brooding and hurry up?" Lance calls impatiently. "If Allura or Coran catches wind of us taking the lions out without permission, we're toast. Done-zo."

"Right, because opening the launching doors will totally not set off a sensor or something," Keith mutters under his breath, but Lance, with his ever-batlike hearing, catches it.

"You underestimate me, Keith," he drawls, and when Keith's eyes flick to him, he's posed halfway up Red's lowered ramp, circling a hand in the air, mouth pulled into an especially smug smirk. "I have the power of God on my side. And by God I mean Pidge."

"Right," Keith says doubtfully, but walks over to him anyway. The Black Lion's presence recedes from his spine. He doesn't look back.

He doesn't realize until he's standing in Red just how much he's missed her. Functionally, all of the lions are the same on the inside (something he's never been able to understand, when they are sustained by such different dispositions), but they all have idiosyncrasies that only their paladins can discern. In Red, it's the scuff in the upper right corner of the floor, and the nicks around the bayard mechanism from where Keith's hand had missed once or twice, and the omnipresent smell of smoke.

"Hey, girl," Keith greets her quietly when her energy rises to meet him. "Long time, huh?"

"Don't get _too_ cozy," Lance interjects, buckling into the pilot's seat. "Last thing I need is her deciding she wants you back after all."

"No, she likes you," Keith says without thinking, because he can feel it, because Red is telling him so, proudly and approvingly, and for some reason it's kind of embarrassing. "I can tell."

"Huh," Lance muses, blinking up at him, mouth small, as it is whenever something catches him off-guard. "Well, cool." He beams toothily. "I like her, too!"

He starts working at various panels with nimble fingers, checking Red's vitals takeoff. Then, slowly and thoughtfully, eyes not meeting Keith's, he clears his throat and ventures, "So, uh, I never really asked. How's the Black Lion handling for you?"

Keith stiffens. No, Lance had never really asked him that, but nobody else had, either. It had never been clear to him if he appreciated that or not.

"Uh…" He glances down, lifting a hand to rub absentmindedly at the side of his neck. "Fine, I guess?"

"Yeah?" Lance asks. It isn't skeptical, or anything. In fact, Keith can't parse the tone of it at all.

"Yeah," Keith replies with a bit of an edge, crossing his arms tightly. "Why?"

"Just checking," Lance assures him without a trace of defensiveness or judgment. The faint light from the holographic screens skirts his profile and his eyelashes in a warm blue glow, softening his whole face, and Keith suddenly can't help but stare. "I just—I'll bet it's a lot, you know? I don't think I'd be able to do it. And I know you were freaked out about it."

"I wasn't—" Keith starts to lie, and then thinks the better of it, if only because Lance briefly levels him with a pointed, deadpan look, daring him to continue. "I don't know what you want me to say. It's fine; I'm fine. No problems."

Lance sighs, so softly that it's nearly imperceptible, gaze and eyelids lowering. Keith feels a burgeoning guilt in his stomach at the sight, compelled once again to apologize for something he doesn't understand.

The only difference is that this time, the urge gets the better of him.

"Sorry," he says.

"Don't be sorry," Lance tells him earnestly. "And it's—there's not some magic response I'm looking for here. I want you to say what… you want to say. So as long as that's what you want to say—"

Keith opens his mouth and inhales, in preparation for a rush of truths that, in an instant, at the first trace of Lance's low and even voice, have converged at his chest, around his heart, spurred by its thunderous pulse: _It's hard, it's so hard, and sometimes I can still feel him in there, like it wants me to remember I'm just filling in for a ghost, and I'm so scared that I'll get you all killed, that I'm not good enough, that I'll never be good enough, that I'm letting him down, that there's no good reason for anyone to stay after all._

But they catch on something, the same sharp and steel-edged part of him that has silenced him every time before.

"Yeah," he lies to Lance's face, which is angled up at him now, open and complicated and human. "That's—yeah. That's it, I guess."

Lance's eyes search his for only a moment after that, but the weight of it lingers before Keith for longer than he would like.

"Okay," Lance declares after a beat, swiveling away again. "But, uh… for what it's worth, you can… talk to me anytime. If you, y'know. If you change your mind." He loudly clears his throat, resuming the preparations with renewed focus. "All right, done, moment over."

Keith breathes out, one corner of his mouth quirking fondly. "Right."

It only takes another few seconds for Lance to finish prepping for launch, and as he wraps it up, the bay door at the end of the jetway begins to lift. A flash of paranoia hits Keith—it isn't that he doesn't trust Pidge's abilities, more that he doesn't trust her not to prank them. But no alarms start going off, and Allura doesn't start yelling at them over the comm, so maybe she'd shown some restraint this time after all.

"Better buckle in, samurai," Lance tells him wryly, flashing him a fiendish smirk as he settles his grip on the controls. "Things are about to get _bump-ay_."

As if on cue, as if they'd been _practicing_ this, Red lets out a galaxy-shaking roar, crouches for just an instant, and blasts toward and then out of the hangar door.

The momentum flings Keith back, but he doesn't lose his grip on the back of Lance's chair. Alfor really should've put passenger seats in these things; Keith is getting _so_ sick of riding shotgun without a seatbelt.

Lance lets out one of his customary exuberant whoops, thrusting his controls forward to spur Red into a boosted ascent. Space spans out above them, below them, around them, a hundred crowded swathes of stars, of boundless discovery.

Keith is so sick of space.

"Where are we going?" he asks, almost dreading the answer.

Lance shrugs, beaming straight ahead. "No idea. We'll know when we get there!"

Keith opens his mouth as if to argue, but then remembers that he has never been the one to care about disciplinary actions that may arise from any rule-breaking and snaps it shut, humming noncommittally.

"Nah, I'm just messing with you," Lance says. "There's a planet nearby that Hunk and I got a look at yesterday when we were on patrol, and it's super cool. It's called, uh, XVR-192, or something, I think was how Pidge translated it? I guess Alteans kinda gave up on naming things after they found a few thousand. Anyway, you gotta see it."

"The last time you and Hunk discovered a 'super cool planet,' it turned out to be alive," Keith deadpans. "And carnivorous. And explosive. So—"

"Okay, but not this one," Lance cuts him off indignantly, raising one slender finger for emphasis. "I _checked_. Definitely not alive. And anyway, we're not gonna _land_ or anything. Just cruise around the atmosphere and jet. Now let's see…"

With a wicked gleam in his eyes, he exhales a, "hah!" and pushes the right controller while tugging the left back, and Red obeys it with an upward surge that nearly ends on a twirl. Keith nearly has to fling an arm around Lance's neck to keep from being chucked into the back wall and no doubt getting his neck broken, but Lance seems unfazed by his brush with death.

"You okay back there?" Lance asks without a trace of concern, turning his head slightly but not straying his eyes from the nav.

"I'm not _dead_ ," Keith snaps.

"Oh, good," Lance says cheerfully, "because that was just the warm-up."

He pushes Red into a nosedive, directly toward a passing cluster of asteroids. Keith's shouted warning dies on his tongue when Red leans into an effortless barrel roll to dodge one, then another, swooping over and under the rocks without so much as a graze—and so quickly that even Keith has a moment's trouble keeping up with the movements.

It's… incredible. Red has always been the fastest, certainly, and she and Keith had gotten up to some nigh-unbelievable speeds—but not like this. Not with such joy, such _freedom_. Lance's piloting has brought something out of Red that Keith could never have imagined was even in her programming, something playful and unburdened.

"Whoa," he says without thinking, and then promptly feels like a moron, but he catches the edge of a bright grin on Lance's face and a flush at the tips of his ears.

He loosens, and so do his fingers, resting just behind Lance's neck, where the ends of Lance's hair graze them when he moves. Lance is laughing, lively and free, as though all of this is his and only his: every corner of space, every iota of power in Red's ancient soul, every rushing beat of Keith's exhilarated heart.

The last of the asteroids falls away behind them, and Red coasts out into the open again, rumbling proudly. Lance pats part of the control pad, cooing praises at her, and Keith rolls his eyes. Showoffs, both of them.

Lance gets them to the planet in only a few doboshes, sparing no extravagant flight trick along the way. Keith doesn't really mind. There's a different kind of adrenaline that charges through his blood when he isn't piloting, nothing like the vague unease that stirs when he's got to trust Pidge to navigate an asteroid belt, or the mounting frustration when he's shouting instructions to Hunk that go repeatedly ignored. He'd only ridden a roller coaster once in his life, but it's sort of like that—a freefall, a sense of weightlessness, a burst of energy in his chest that could manifest as either a laugh or a scream.

He doesn't do either, obviously. Not like Lance needs _more_ material with which to make fun of him.

The planet is small, blue, and almost entirely a jungle; stout pygmy trees with indigo leaves and huge lilac blossoms cluster together in a far-spread, glistening canopy. Lance enters its atmosphere without a hitch, carefully easing Red into a cruising speed far enough above the surface for them to make a quick getaway if they have to, but close enough for Keith to lean over slightly and see a glittering red lake through the window.

He's never really been the type of person to, you know, cry at the Grand Canyon or be overwhelmed by the sight of a good waterfall, but he thinks he gets it, right then.

"This is—" The word eludes him. Fantastical, bizarre, dreamlike; kind of ugly, but vibrant and warm.

"Right?" Lance exclaims, flinging his arms out for emphasis, and Keith has to stifle an appreciative smile.

A companionable silence stretches between them, while Keith stares out at the landscape and Lance watches the open sky ahead. The bruises around Keith's neck in the shape of not-Shiro's fingers no longer ache as they have been for days ( _days_ , he thinks, a little urgently, as if to make himself remember what they are); his breathing is even, and subdued, and the twinge of tension in his shoulders has started to lessen. The jungle goes on for miles and miles, vanishing into a hazy rose-edged horizon, thriving in spite of everything, in spite of loneliness, in spite of war.

A lump starts to form in Keith's throat.

"Hey," Lance says, softly and carefully, tugging him from his introspection before his eyes can start doing something stupid like watering. Keith turns his head to find that Lance is staring directly up at him, having set Red to autopilot, and his breath hitches. "You know no matter what happens, we're gonna get through it. I know it looks bad right now, but—" One corner of his mouth (clever and devious and kind) pulls up into a hesitant half-smile. "Defenders of the universe, right? Kind of our job."

It's barely even a joke at all, but Keith smiles wanly, too, thin and brief, but not false.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is—" Lance chews his lip, brows furrowing, eyes darting evasively to the floor. "I know you think you're alone, but… you're not. Maybe you were once—maybe you were for a long time; I don't know; you're not a big sharer—but that was a long time ago. You aren't, y'know… out in the desert anymore. You're here, with us. And we're—well, we're here with you." His face has gone almost entirely crimson, but he manages to lock eyes with Keith for the last part: "You _do_ know that. Right?"

Keith doesn't. To take for granted something as mutable as the thought that someone will _stay_ —or, maybe, he thinks with a stab of an old pain in his chest, that someone won't _leave_ —has always seemed naïve and unwise. How can anyone ever _know_ that? How can anyone presume to accept that as a certainty?

He wishes the same thing that he always does when someone asks him a question like that: that it were that simple. But maybe it can be. Lance's eyes, clear and open, are making it seem like the simplest thing in the world, suddenly.

He nods, silent, and hopes that it's good enough. It probably isn't. He's never been great with responding to that kind of stuff. Or… anything, really.

"You've gotten really good at piloting," he tells Lance, instead of what he should.

But Lance brightens all the same, practically preening, and Keith has to reel in the instinct to roll his eyes.

"Yeah, well, what can I say?" Lance drawls, framing his chin with his thumb and index finger. "I'm a man of many talents."

"I'm serious," Keith says, and Lance loses the vain air, trying to hide the humbled flush to his cheeks with a goofy smile and an angled-away face.

He turns to resume the flight, but Keith stops him.

"Lance. Listen to me," Keith blurts out, and swallows. "There is no Voltron without you."

He has no idea where that comes from, but it freezes Lance where he sits, all traces of jocularity wiped clean.

Keith inhales, bewildered to find that it shakes. His face and hands feel warmer than they should, and his fingers twitch toward Lance's shoulder, a moment away from clasping it.

"I mean it," he insists, as earnestly and emphatically as he can, because even after all this time, he still hasn't been able to figure out how to get Lance to listen to him, and the best he can do is utter this as if it's the last thing he'll ever say. "I know that; Sh—Shiro knew that." Where had that past tense come from? "Everyone knows that. The only one who doesn't seem to get it is—"

He trails off, hoping that the sentiment will complete itself in the space between them, so that he won't have to, so that he won't have to admit that these are things he pays attention to.

It's a while before Lance speaks. He stares up at Keith, mouth agog, eyebrows aloft, and the longer he holds that expression, the more strongly Keith feels inclined to eject himself into the atmosphere and die.

"It's…" Lance rasps at last, and Keith makes a note to punch himself later, because he actually _leans forward_ in response. Lance bows his head until his bangs partially obscure his eyes, and there's that look again, one that's sad and conflicted and heavier than he was maybe made to bear. Keith hates that look with everything in him. "Yeah, it's dumb. I'm working on it. But…"

Keith is barely bracing himself on the seat anymore, having gradually moved forward until his body is nearly facing Lance head-on. The tips of his fingers still linger there, so that his arm is outstretched beside Lance's head, close enough that Lance could lean on it if he wanted to.

"Thanks," Lance tells him, lifting his head with a wobbly smile, a sight that makes Keith's stomach jump. "Thanks, Keith."

And Keith is, in a descending instant, gripped by the conviction that something is about to happen—a balance tilting, the slow shifting of tectonic plates before an earthquake. Lance's eyes are blue and bright and he's still smiling at him, in a grateful and reverent way that Keith has never been smiled at in his life, and if Keith were to lift his hand and move it just a few inches over, it would graze Lance's jawline, and he remembers how immense and alien that training room had felt around them all that time ago, how far apart they had seemed even when Lance's nose had just missed his after a punch fallen short, nothing like the quiet intimacy of Red's cockpit, nothing like this.

"Yeah, it's—well, you know, yeah," Keith replies brilliantly.

Oh, God, let Zarkon himself do a flying kick through the windshield and kill him, right now.

Lance coughs, in a way that could not be more obviously disguising a laugh.

"Yeah," he agrees, making an effort at a solemn nod that ultimately fails.

"Shut up," Keith mutters, eyes flicking petulantly to the ceiling, and the moment has passed. "You know I'm no good at this stuff."

"What stuff would that be?" Lance prods him with a smug grin.

Keith wrenches his eyes shut and grumbles, "Words. Feelings. _That_ stuff."

" _Feelings_ , huh?" Lance muses, sounding immensely satisfied, and it makes Keith's teeth clench and his neck go hot. "Well, don't worry about it." He flashes him a grin and winks, fleetingly, but it nearly knocks Keith backwards. "You'll get there. It just takes practice."

"Uh-huh," Keith says, laying the skepticism on thick for effect, but he almost believes him.

Lance stretches his arms over his head, hands linked and turned upwards, and makes a satisfied noise, reminding Keith all too vividly of a cat just waking up from a long and fruitful nap.

"Well," Lance all but exhales, dropping his arms back to his sides, palms slapping his knees. "There is at least a seventy-six percent chance that Allura has noticed we bailed by now and is preparing an assassination order, so—since you seem passably cheered up—ready to go home and beg for our lives?"

Keith laughs despite himself, low and tentative, but then Lance's words catch up to him and he stops.

"Home?" he repeats, taken aback by how natural it sounds.

Lance shrugs, wrapping his fingers around the controls and smiling ruefully at the view, eyes fixed on the horizon, though they dart, unguarded, to Keith's.

"Well, yeah," he says, and inhales through his nose until his spine straightens. "Best we've got, right?"

Keith thinks of Earth, and its wide oceans, its dense forests, and the way it smells after a storm, primordial and clear; he thinks of the sprawling desert, the round white sun, the tin rooftop and the moth-eaten blanket and the stars, burning innumerable in the heavens; and of how deeply it had affected him the first time he had learned that their light had to travel such a distance to reach him that some of them weren't even there anymore, though he could see them; and of how he would gaze for hours at a dagger he didn't recognize and think that maybe that was the closest thing in space to memory.

He thinks of Lance, growing up by the sea, long legs kicking up foam, laugh bursting out of him like the constant green waves over the shore. He thinks of all the places they've been and all they've yet to be, wars they've yet to end, stories they've yet to change. He thinks of Pidge, searching the galaxy for her family because that's just what you do when you love someone. He thinks of Hunk, always charging into danger and uncertainty despite his fear. He thinks of Allura, and how her hope persists with an intensity that will never bow or yield; he thinks of Coran, and how he talks of Altea as if for the briefest of moments he forgets that it isn't there anymore, and how he talks of all of them, with pride and admiration that's almost embarrassing.

He thinks of Shiro, wherever he may be—the steadiness of his voice and the beat of his heart, the pink scar on his face that he would never address, and how he would only ever touch any of them with his left hand, his human hand, the one with veins and bones and calluses, the one that nothing could ever replicate or misuse. That's the hand Keith chooses to remember.

Lance's answer had come out of him so easily, almost flippantly, and in a way, Keith almost envies him—but Red is beginning her ascent into the sky again, and Lance is humming that same song he'd been whistling in the hallway, and life goes on on the planet below them, unbothered, and he decides that there's not much point in that kind of stuff. There never really has been. And in the facility outside the Garrison, under the waning desert moon, Lance had remembered his name.

"Yep," he says, and sets his feet apart so that when the turbulence hits, he won't stumble. "Best we've got."


End file.
